Jovan Belcher’s Guns

“If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today,’” Bob Costas, of NBC, said in a halftime commentary on “Sunday Night Football.” Costas was, as he noted, quoting, or slightly paraphrasing, Jason Whitlock, a columnist based in Kansas City, “with whom I do not always agree, but who today said it so well.” Kansas City was where Belcher played for the Chiefs football team, and where he shot his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, in front of their baby daughter and his mother. The gun he used to murder her was legal, as was a second one that he used to shoot and kill himself after driving to the Chiefs’ training facility—and so too were yet more guns that were apparently in their house.

For his commentary, which lasted about a minute and a half, Costas has been subjected to attacks and insults and calls that he be fired. In other circles, he has, properly, been praised, for what was one of the only forthright looks at what had happened during the coverage of Sunday’s games. Mainly, though, he had to contend with vitriol and nervousness about whether halftime was really the right moment. He and NBC issued statements assuring everyone that he was behind the Second Amendment, and just wanted some sensible guidelines and a change in the culture. In an interview with Dan Patrick, Costas wondered if he had made “a mistake” in trying to address the issue in such a short time, leaving his words “open to too much interpretation.” He pointed out that he’d said there would be other subjects to cover, too, including, “The possible connection between football and this particular tragedy”—meaning not only the habits of a violent game and the distortions of money and fame, but the effects of concussions.

Costas had quoted Whitlock after using half of his brief commentary to complain about hearing “that most mindless of sports clichés … something like this really puts it all in perspective,” adding “You want some actual perspective on this?”:

“Our current gun culture,” Whitlock wrote, “ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.”

“Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.”

That can’t be said often enough. Our guns are fantasy objects as much as weapons, treated as transformative guarantors of freedom and safety rather than accelerators of violence. As Costas said to Patrick, “There are people who honestly believe that in Aurora if only a dozen or so people there to watch the Batman movie had been packin’, they would have been able to take down the nut job in full body armor with military-type guns. I think any police officer, if you told them that would roll their eyes.” Most often, all that a gun does is add a gun to the situation.

Costas’s critics were outraged by the idea that guns were anything but an incidental plot element, as innocent as the flapping of butterfly wings. Some responded by counting out the ways in which Belcher could have killed both Perkins and himself without a gun—a morbid, reality-denying game. “What I believe in my heart is Jovan Belcher was going to find a way to wreak havoc that day whether he had a gun or a knife or only his fists,” one Fox Sports columnist wrote. Another suggested that Belcher could have driven his car into a wall. There are men who do that. But guns make everything faster and deadlier—they remove the space for doubt and regret, reaction and rescue. Recognizing this does nothing to exculpate Belcher; ignoring it is beyond obstinate.

Another argument, offered over at the Daily Caller, was that if only Kasandra had a gun then she could have saved herself—as if she didn’t already live in a house full of weapons. Is the idea that a young mother in her bedroom at seven o’clock in the morning should have a loaded gun at arm’s reach—where a child, too, could find it—in case her boyfriend comes home angry? (Belcher had been with another woman for the previous few hours.) Perkins was smaller than Belcher: running for a household gun might have done little more than put it in his hands. There is also something deeply flawed in a vision of leaving women to deal with abuse by pulling a gun on their partners. When are they supposed to pull the trigger? What happens next? It’s frustrating, too, to hear from those who only really seem interested in domestic violence when they want to argue that Bob Costas ought to talk about anything but guns.

If one really wanted to engage in counterfactuals, one might instead note that Belcher’s mother was in the next room; she was alerted to the seriousness of what was happening by the sounds of gunshots. What use could she have made of even a few more seconds? Instead, she came in to see him kissing Perkins on the forehead as she lay bleeding, and was left to phone for help for a woman she called her daughter; on the 911 recording, she can be heard trying to will Perkins not to die. (“Stay with me, the ambulance is on the way. Stay with me Kasandra, stay with me.”) She is now taking care of the baby girl.

This is the point where gun advocates go back to saying that a single story, one tragedy, does not tell you anything about guns. And that is true, too. So here are some statistics. According to the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, “The data are clear: More incidents of murder-suicide occur with guns than with any other weapon. … In 591 murder-suicides, 92 percent were committed with a gun. States with less restrictive gun control laws have as much as eight times the rate of murder-suicides as those with the most restrictive gun control laws.” Another study found that the mere presence of a gun in the house increased the chance that domestic violence would escalate to murder six fold.

John Lott, a anti-gun-control advocate, worried, in an attack on Costas at FoxNews.com, that statistics showing that most victims know their murderer might dissuade people from keeping a weapon in the house: “But this claim regarding domestic violence irresponsibly makes people afraid of those who they have no reason to be afraid of…. Acquaintance murders also include prostitutes and their pimps or Johns.” There are few things less helpful, in the case of guns and domestic violence, than the assumption that the right sort of people will never be hurt by either.

Domestic, or intimate-partner violence, is a problem that goes well beyond guns. Some forty per cent of women who are murdered in America are killed by men with whom they are or were in relationships (the most dangerous moment is when she tries to leave). Men are killed by women in their lives, too; the N.I.J. notes that “In 70-80 percent of intimate partner homicides, no matter which partner was killed, the man physically abused the woman before the murder.” Confronting our gun culture doesn’t mean silence about violence against women: the pathologies are entwined.

What one needs, in both cases, is what Costas would call some actual perspective. But the almost hysterical reaction to the intrusion, into a football game, of America’s obsession with guns, only shows that Costas performed a service by bringing the issue up. Most politicians haven’t been that brave. What is so radical, so wrong, about imagining Kasandra Perkins, safe, or at least alive, without a gun in sight?